


trade all my tomorrows

by piecesofgold



Category: Anastasia - Flaherty/Ahrens/McNally
Genre: F/M, Immortals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:14:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26739451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piecesofgold/pseuds/piecesofgold
Summary: “Sometimes I think we forget more than we learn.”
Relationships: Dimitri | Dmitry/Anya | Anastasia Romanov (Anastasia 1997 & Broadway)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 22





	trade all my tomorrows

**Author's Note:**

> today on cat rushes a bad ending to something that’s been in her word docs since, like, march.

**1969**

“Amazing, isn’t it?”

The woman smiles, not turning around. “It’s certainly something.”

“Ah, Nastya.” He’s stood beside her now, looking out over the crowd of cheering and whooping and crying people. “At least pretend to be impressed.”

His eyes follow Apollo 11’s trail up into the sky, grinning like he knows something the men in the faraway shuttle don’t. He probably does; he helped create most of the stars up there, after all.

“It, ah,” she tries not to wince. “It’s Anya now.”

He peers at her, brown eyes questioning over his sunglasses. “Anya,” he tests her name in his mouth, making Anya shiver despite the muggy Florida heat. “Got it.”

It shocks her, looking at him straight on for the first time in almost forty years. He’s more filled out, his hair longer, but the tilt of his mouth as he gazes at her is the same.

Anya clears her throat. “And you? What was it you were calling yourself in Prague - Damien?”

She doesn’t need to see his eyes to know he’s rolling them when he huffs. “Still not letting me live that down, I see.”

“Never.” She had been Ana, then. No matter how much time passes since she used it properly, she can never let go of the name she became so fond of.

He pushes his sunglasses to rest on his head, leaning back against a flagpole. The crowd has begun to surge around them, in a rush to hit the freeways and get home. Anya should be leaving too - the drive to Boston will take twice as long with so much traffic.

But his eyes hold her firmly in place. “Dmitry,” he tells her.

Something coils in Anya, warm and familiar. “Like Russia,” she says softly.

Dmitry smiles. “Like Russia.”

* * *

**1913**

It seems a cruel twisted joke that they give her the face of a dead girl.

She only ever sees Anastasia Romanova once - at the Tercentenary, some years before the revolution. A clear May sun lights up a restless crowd of peasants and dignitaries, clutching Icons and straining for a look at the Imperial family.

“What do you think?” Dmitry asks as the Grand Duchesses float by, waving.

Anastasia hums. “Pretty.” She tightens her hold on his arm, squinting at the blurred figure of the girl she shares a name and face with, feeling a surge of pity. “It won’t last.”

“No.” Dmitry pats her hand. “Beautiful while it does, though.”

Anastasia glances over the sea of people around them. “Not for them.”

Dmitry follows her gaze solemnly. “Not for them,” he repeats.

They have stayed too long in this country, moving from village to village as the decades pass. They are running out of places to go and people are beginning to notice.

There is something rooting them here, something that has previously made them stand frozen on a platform watching a train bound for Warsaw steam away from them. So close to leaving on it when the force of refusal sent them stumbling back.

If Anastasia did not know any better, she would think it was her own desire to stay.

What she would do for it to be that simple.

“What do they want us to do?” Dmitry despairs into the dark beside her. “Watch it all fall apart?”

Anastasia traces his jaw, not needing a light to know his face. “I don’t think we get to ask.”

“I know.” He catches her hand and holds it. “I _know_ that. But -“ he exhales bitterly but doesn’t continue.

He doesn’t need to. She understands, better than anyone.

* * *

**1943**

She steers clear of Europe once tensions reach a boiling point, and not just because of a war. Anya’s lived through enough of them to know how they end.

Moving to Canada means putting an entire continent between herself and Dmitry, which she tells herself is for the best. They’ve been together for so long that Anastasia stopped counting around the seventeenth century; a few decades apart is nothing. The blink of an eye. They’ve spent so much time together in self imposed isolation from the world, to protect themselves. A break is good for them.

And yet she misses him like an ache in her bones.

Sometimes she wonders if there was a plan. If _they_ are a genuine real accident or someone - _something_ set them in stone deliberately.

Anastasia stopped trying for answers a very long time ago.

In Quebec, she only speaks French and calls herself Angela, reads books in bars and avoids the news.

“How much longer do you think it’ll last?” A woman asks her one evening, fiddling with a napkin.

Anastasia - _Angela_ \- shrugs. “I don’t think it matters,” she says honestly. “It’s not as if anything will change.”

The woman looks insulted and moves away.

 _Come now, Angela_ , she hears him in her head. _Try to make friends_.

 _What do we need friends for?_ She would tease him. _I have you_.

She takes a bottle of tequila back to her lodgings and stays up all night drinking it to no effect.

She is allowed to miss him for a few hours.

* * *

**1971**

Dmitry moves into her Boston apartment and fucks her on every surface big enough to hold them both.

This is exactly what she needs, Anya realises. He helps her to the brink more than once, the world going white behind her eyes. He sucks marks into one of her breasts, hand groping the other. He nips her jaw, kisses her roughly, a little desperate, and he moves his hand down again, working her relentlessly.

“I missed you,” he pants into her neck, in a language she thought they’d both forgotten.

Anya almost bites through his lip and doesn’t try to stop the tears that fall. “I love you,” she breathes in the same tongue. She does. Always will. Fate or not.

“Where should we go?” She asks into his chest later, his hand stroking her hair.

“I like here,” he tells her. Her nails dig into his skin.

“No,” she says quickly. “My lease is up.” It’s been eleven years, longer than she - _they_ have stayed anywhere.

Dmitry considers that. “You choose. Just -“ he clears his throat. “Not Paris.”

“Or Russia,” she concedes, rolling off him.

They lay there for hours, just listening to each other’s breathing.

“Where was it we stayed in - was it the 1890s?” He frowns, and Anya almost laughs.

“Italy,” she reminds him. “We can’t go back there, did you forget we _fled_ after what you said to the King?”

“ _Seventy five years ago_.”

“The history books may disagree, Dima.” She kisses, sliding her leg between his. “Where, then?”

“I don’t care,” he murmurs. “So long as it’s with you.”

* * *

**2010**

Ireland is vast and green and many things they’ve both seen before, but the farm house is quaint. The elderly widower they buy it from calls them _darling_ and makes them promise to take care of it.

Anya likes to drive North, especially to Derry. Likes reading history she never lived through of people she never met. It makes her feel like there’s still things left to lose.

“Do you remember how old you are?” She asks as they’re walking across the Peace Bridge.

Dmitry pauses. “Few millennia, I think. Why?”

“No reason.” She sighs. “Sometimes I think we forget more than we learn.”

He frowns. “And what else?”

She squeezes his arm. “I miss them.”

She doesn’t need to say who. Polly died eight years ago, Dunya five, and Marfa last year. Grief is no stranger, an old friend they’ve known longer than humanly possible, after they’ve outlived friends and family and children and grandchildren.

Though, human doesn’t quite factor into the equation.

Dmitry’s eyes are downcast. “I know. I do, too.”

Anya leans her head on his arm, weight of the years making her feet drag.

Later on, sweat cooling on their skin, she props up on her elbow and looks him straight in the eyes. "Will we ever find our own place, do you think?"

"No," he said with conviction, his fingers tracing invisible patterns along her collarbone.

She leans forward and kisses him.


End file.
